The Society of Equals

Rosanvallon, Pierre

doi:10.4159/harvard.9780674726444

Cited by 159 publications

(74 citation statements)

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“…Including culture in the examination of status concerns proves especially relevant as in our analyses culture turns out to be more important than the income distribution and economic prosperity. As Rosanvallon (2013) has argued, social equality-a state of society in which everybody is seen and treated as equal and thus receives social worth-does not necessarily flow from low distributive inequality in terms of income and wealth. Our results attest that these considerations are not unfounded, and that a more encompassing complementary change in values and beliefs is needed in order to make progress towards social equality and social well-being in contemporary societies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Better for Everyone? Egalitarian Culture and Social Wellbeing in Europe

Steckermeier

Delhey

2018

Soc Indic Res

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The goal of this study is to explore the relationship between culture and social well-being, focusing on inferiority feelings. While being respected is widely seen as a key ingredient of a good life, inferiority feelings signal a lack of esteem from others. Previous research has mainly looked at income inequality as the key contextual condition for inferiority feelings and other status concerns, often inspired by the income inequality thesis/Spirit Level paradigm (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010). We contribute to this discussion by extending this paradigm into the cultural realm. Our main assumption is that an inegalitarian culture breeds inferiority feelings, whereas an egalitarian culture dampens them and in this sense is "better". Within a multi-level framework we combine information on culture, operationalized as collective values and beliefs, retrieved from the European Value Study for 30 European countries, and survey data on inferiority feelings for over 37,000 individuals from the most recent European Quality of Life Survey (2011-12). Our evidence suggests that widespread self-expression values and social trust (as expressions of an egalitarian culture) are indeed better as they dampen individuals' inferiority feelings while widespread individual blame for poverty (an expression of an inegalitarian culture) heightens them. In further analyses of each income quintile separately, we find evidence that culture mattersfor good or worse-for all income groups, except the poorest quintiles. Our results should prompt scholars of social status and social well-being to pay more attention to the impact of culture.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2013), but also Ridgeway's (2014) claim that people do care about their status. Common inferiority feelings are further seen as a social justice problem, as they undermine the very community of equals' modern democracy (Miller 1999) and a strong welfare state (Rosanvallon 2013) are based on.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Better for Everyone? Egalitarian Culture and Social Wellbeing in Europe

Steckermeier

Delhey

2018

Soc Indic Res

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“…Members of the broader community are more likely to empathize with those who lose their jobs or incur earning losses when they believe that this is the result of "unfair" practices. In the words of Rosanvallon (2016), "inequality is felt most acutely when citizens believe that the rules apply differently to different people." 12…”

Section: Trade Redistribution and Fairnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Populism and the economics of globalization

2018

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“…Allow me first briefly to justify and elaborate my claim that the principle at the core of Western notions of individualism, equality, and justice has historically been that of the equivalence of individuals: that is, the possibility of comparing or measuring people on the basis of some external criterion, which can lead to various forms of ordering and evaluating. As Pierre Rosanvallon () has argued, this conception was forged above all in the American and French revolutions, where equality was first and foremost a democratic quality: a way of making a society of similar individuals, in direct opposition to aristocratic society. The nation‐state contributed to this homogenization; the term ‘adunation’ was coined to describe the movement whereby a group of individuals ‘make a nation,’ that is, achieve unity in equality.…”

Section: The Horizon Of Similaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Equality without equivalence: an anthropology of the common★

Walker

2020

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article elaborates an Amazonian conception of the common and the challenge it poses to Western thinking about individualism and equality. It is suggested that a number of distinctive features of Amazonian Urarina sociality may have their basis in a shared refusal of factors that give rise to relations of equivalence between people. This kind of singularism, or 'individualism without individuals', results from an orientation to the common as a collective resource that is antithetical to property, in which subjectivity is shaped in relation to wider ecological and affective resources that are continuously and collectively produced. This embraces not only shared economic resources, such as land or game animals, but also ways of organizing and producing affective, cognitive, and linguistic relations, 'commonalities' of various kinds which never reduce differences to an abstract subject, such as the individual of liberalism or the collective of socialism.

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The Society of Equals

Cited by 159 publications

References 0 publications

Better for Everyone? Egalitarian Culture and Social Wellbeing in Europe

Better for Everyone? Egalitarian Culture and Social Wellbeing in Europe

Populism and the economics of globalization

Equality without equivalence: an anthropology of the common★

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